A journey through the Making Waves archives will reveal that most of our listening activity takes place via Soundcloud. It’s free (or relatively affordable), and it’s a user-generated-content platform with less barriers to entry and more consistent content than some online destinations. For this month’s playlist we wanted to journey further afield and highlight some of the works received via a few services. Composers and performers, we always encourage you to submit your work for possible inclusion in a Making Waves playlist no matter where it may be hosted. It may take longer to build up enough of a submission pool for a playlist, but we are listening and noting all incoming tracks.
Without further ado, here are four immersive longer-form tracks hosted at various websites ( Vimeo, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube). Listeners, we ask you to take a slightly more active role in clicking on this webpage to hear each featured track, circumnavigating the geographical world via electrons signalling various URLs. But in return, we promise evocative and intriguing listening, right through the spectrum of sonic media from acoustic to soundscape.
Vimeo
HUEI, Door to the River
for found sounds, acoustic drums, acoustic piano, acoustic cello. Credits:
Composer, pianist, quadrophonics and spatialisation, found sounds: Huei | video art: Chiaw Ping Tan | drums: Christian Rainer | cello: Nikkie Dobosi | recording engineers: Borna Crvelin, Nathan Lee | cello recording engineer: Luke Warren.
Bandcamp
TARAB, HOUSEKEEPING
for found sound and found objects. Performed by TARAB.
Soundcloud
Kitty Xiao, Novum
for alto flute, bass flute, violin and piano. Performed by Nimbus Trio.
YouTube
Evan Lawson, The Nephelai
for string quartet and harp. Performed by Evan Lawson: conductor, Tonkunstler Orchestra at the Grafenegg Festival, Austria, August 2015.
We’d love to hear about your listening experience! Share your thoughts or send messages of support to our featured composers and performers in the comment box below. We also encourage you to click through to Vimeo, Bandcamp, Soundcloud or YouTube to like, comment and subscribe to Making Waves as well as the composers, performers, and presenters featured.
The Circumnavigating Waves playlist will be featured until 1st August 2019. All previous playlists from 2015 to present are available in our blog archives for the life of the project, so please do explore the website for previously featured sounds.
MAKING WAVES 
Embedding didn’t work for me in your feed, and the links given are to composer pages. The good news is that Vimeo and Youtube both have volume controls on their embedded players, while Soundcloud and Bandcamp still insist that those are unnecessary regardless of users complaining about their absence.
It does rather take away from the musical experience to have to spend time clicking around before being able to listen to each track.
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(the problem is that the only volume is FULL VOLUME which means that before I can hit play I need to change the volume setting on my whole computer, and then afterwards change it again. And if I forget I GET A VERY LOUD REMINDER. I’m at the stage now where the repeated negative feedback means I have a mental association Soundcloud = pain)
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Hi Moz, Thank you so much for all this feedback about the listening and navigating experience this month, and your patience with our reply. I guess the solution to non-functioning embeds is to click through to the webpage for the playlist in a browser, but this might not be your usual reading/listening/browsing habit. Regarding the multi-platform experience, we thought we’d try something different but we are by no means bound to this model for future playlists. Your input helps the team discussions around this and is appreciated. You bring up some very interesting and relevant points about the varying listener experience across various platforms, especially the lack of volume control on Soundcloud, which despite our frequent usage of, we hadn’t really had cause to notice in all these past few years of curating! I guess if one is listening on a single platform, the volume is more uniform and can be controlled at the computer end with a single click. We hope the a future Soundcloud-only playlist will be a much more positive experience that helps to replace this negative association.
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